the white horse press full citation: beattie, james

The White Horse Press

Full citation: Beattie, James. "Colonial Geographies of Settlement: Vegetation,

Towns, Disease and Well–Being In Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1830s–1930s." Environment and History 14, no. 4, Trans-Tasman Forest History special issue (November 2008): 583–610. http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/3361.

Rights: All rights reserved. © The White Horse Press 2008. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism or review, no part of this article may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, including photocopying or recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission from the publishers. For further information please see http://www.whpress.co.uk.

Environment and History 14 (2008): 583–610. doi: 10.3197/096734008X368457© 2008 The White Horse Press

Colonial Geographies of Settlement: Vegetation, Towns, Disease and Well-Being in Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1830s–1930s1

JAMES BEATTIE

Department of HistoryUniversity of WaikatoPrivate Bag 3105, Hamilton 3240, Waikato, New ZealandEmail: [email protected]

ABSTRACT

A fruitful new area of environmental history research can be undertaken on the relationship between plants and health in colonial societies. By using New Zealand as a case study, I demonstrate the strength of settler beliefs in the con-nections between existing environments, environmental transformation, and their own health. I attempt to reconnect the historiographies of medical and environmental history by arguing that urban settlements – as much as rural areas – were important sites for debates about environmental change and hu-man health. I adopt a broad perspective in order to sketch out the contours of a new field, demonstrating the complicated connections between health, aesthetic appreciation, medicine and garden history. Furthermore, I argue that many envi-ronmental-health ideas associated with miasmic theories became incorporated into the microbial ʻrevolution ̓taking place from the late nineteenth century. Finally, I note that a close study of settler environmental-health ideas reveals a far more ambiguous – a far more anxious – history of European engagement with temperate colonies than the existing historiography on the topic posits. Rather than wholly confident and arrogant agents of environmental exploitation, it reveals that great anxieties about health existed side-by-side with confidence in the environmentally transformative potential of colonisation.

KEYWORDS

Environment, health, colonisation, New Zealand, miasma, urban history

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COLONIAL GEOGRAPHIES OF SETTLEMENT585

Environment and History 14.4 Environment and History 14.4

The life of human beings is connected intimately … with the vegetable produc-tions of the globe, not only as regards the materials for their food, but also in reference to the air which they breathe. (J.B. Armstrong, 1880)2

In nineteenth-century settler culture, landscape and vegetation figured as more than simply backdrops to human affairs. In a society lacking effective medical intervention, environment assumed a power that we can today only imagine. Environment affected life and death, sickness and health. The rhythms of daily life moved in time with the patterns of seasonal disease. At certain times of the year agues, remittent fevers, malarias and other diseases affected peopleʼs lives, restricting their activities and putting those with susceptible constitutions into bed. Therefore, divining ʻhealthy ̓from ʻunhealthy ̓areas took on great importance for Europeans encountering new lands. Settling on the edge of New Zealandʼs broad Hauraki Plains3 in the early 1830s, James Preece, Church Missionary Society Catechist, fretted that the area ̒ has every sign of an unhealthy place. The land is very low and entirely surrounded by swamp, which extends for miles, and comes close to the settlement. ̓Already, he observed, ʻ[t]he vapour which arises there from during the whole of the summer ̓had caused the death of three children. In response to these fears, in 1835 the Mission Station relocated from that ʻunhealthy place ̓to a site ʻhigher up and washed by the seaʼ.4

Using New Zealand as a case study, in this article I attempt to reconnect the vital relationship believed by nineteenth-century settlers to exist between plants and health, which has received scant attention from New Zealandʼs medical and environmental historians. This is unfortunate since, as Gregg Mitman notes, ʻconceptions of health have been integral to [human] environmental experience and understandingʼ.5 In reconnecting these important historiographies, I examine some of the complexity and contradiction hitherto ignored by literature on settler environmental and medical ideas. Significant connections, I demonstrate, existed in settler attitudes and actions regarding health, aesthetics, tree-planting, plant acclimatisation and conservation. Most of all, I mark out new areas for scholarly research, showcasing the centrality of environmental-health ideas to the process of colonisation and focusing equally on rural and (under-researched) urban areas in the hope of stimulating more fine-grained studies in this new field.

MEDICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORIOGRAPHY

Excepting Pamela Woodʼs fascinating interpretation of settler medical ideas in nineteenth-century Dunedin and other selected studies, New Zealandʼs otherwise rich medical historiography has not foregrounded the role of environment-health ideas in settler colonisation.6 Unsurprisingly, scholarship has accorded signifi-cance to state intervention in health care through regional or national studies of medical institutions, and to the development of professional organisations, like those for dentistry, pharmacy, doctoring and nursing. New Zealand is also

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particularly rich in the historiography of mental health.7 Taking a cue from Michel Foucault, its medical historians have read archives of mental health care ʻagainst the grain ̓to reveal hidden experiences of institutional care, particularly for women, and have charted the complexities and competing factions of mental health care organisation.8 Where medical historiography engages with colonisa-tion in great detail, it is generally through the lens of state interventions in Maori health care, studies of Darwinian ideas, and investigations of colonial medical science and racial policies.9 This scholarship can be enriched through studies that foreground settler ideas and experiences of health as central not just to medical historiography but also to the settler histories of Aotearoa/New Zealand.10

An equally rich vein of scholarship defines New Zealandʼs environmental history, particularly of the colonial period where environmental change was astonishingly rapid and widespread.11 In this period, New Zealand is excellently served by studies of plant and animal introductions into the island country, in addition to a burgeoning scholarship on its forest and conservation histories. A resounding silence falls, however, in studies of the colonial period which incorporate medical or health ideas with resource use, conservation or aes-thetics.12 This silence, I think, reflects the overwhelming particularisation of knowledge both within our present society and within disciplines. Increasingly since the early twentieth century western society has set up ʻboundary mark-ers ̓between different bodies of knowledge, such that we now think of religion, science, health, conservation as separate fields, where once they were thought to be closely related.13 Since our own societal values inform our assumptions about the past, historians have considered health and conservation literature as separate fields, one belonging to the realm of the medical historian, the other to the environmental historian. Thus, understandings of urban conservation, plant acclimatisation, public garden making and forest conservation cannot be adequately understood in isolation from the medical ideas which informed set-tler activities. They are perhaps particularly important for an additional reason. By the early twentieth century New Zealand was one of the most urbanised countries in the world, and it was in urban areas that often fierce debates took place over the relationship between health, tree planting, park provision and conservation, yet paradoxically it is in these areas that New Zealandʼs environ-mental history is weakest.14

Investigating the complex and often contrary interpretations of colonial health ideas can present unsettling narratives at odds with portrayals of European settlers as arrogant and confident agents of colonisation, intent on building an acquisitive, materialistic society in which the ʻpromise of profit provided suf-ficient moral warrant in an atmosphere where human self-interest determined morality and the natural physical order was not seen as deserving any necessary respectʼ.15 Settler acknowledgement of the limitations and lack of control over environments and their own health were as central to colonisation as its ̒ textual appropriation ̓of peoples and lands or the massive and rapid landscape changes

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ushered in by colonisation.16 Anxiety and confidence were interwoven into the very fabric of colonial engagement with landscape.

While I particularly focus on settler ideas about health and plants, I also touch upon conservation, climate-health debates, environmental determinism, urban design and racial ideas. First examined are settler ideas of disease and the relationship perceived to exist between plants and health; second, assessments of the benefits of plants; third, ambiguities in attitudes to vegetation; and fourth, changing attitudes towards environment and vegetation in the twentieth century, with the aim of stimulating future research.

SETTLER IDEAS OF HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT

As today, popular and elite medical opinion in the nineteenth century encom-passed a spectrum of different beliefs concerning the efficacy of different cures and the mechanisms explaining the spread of disease. New Zealandʼs first medi-cal publication, The Homeopathic Echo (1855–6), testifies to the importance of popular remedies for illness, as do the widespread advertisement of herbal remedies in newspapers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and parliamentary attempts to legislate against ̒ quackery ̓within settler society and to restrict Maori healing options.17 Materia medica explicitly stated the connection between health and plants, but these relationships also extended to education and taxonomic interest in plants. The original purpose of botanical gardens was to furnish medicinal plants, a function that was still critical to the medical educa-tion of many of New Zealandʼs doctors, particularly those trained in Scotland who also received a thorough training in botany and natural history.18

At a more popular level, doctors, charlatans, quacks and chemists plied a wide variety of remedies derived from plant products on the general public. The ubiquitous eucalypt, for instance, found its way into many tinctures, potions and remedies in New Zealand.19 Many were also derived from this countryʼs native plants, often by drawing extensively on Maori knowledge systems.20 These examples evince the plurality of medical thought and the breadth of healing options sought by settlers, but they also testify to the strength of alterna-tive medicines and a relative lack of confidence in the efficacy of the medical profession.21 The plurality of medical options available to settlers was reflected by the similar breadth of theories about the spread of disease. Certain diseases like smallpox were widely recognised to be communicable while others, like typhus or malaria, were thought to reflect the interaction of environments and peopleʼs constitutions.22 Whether they liked it or not, a personʼs susceptibility to a particular disease was thought to reflect his or her own constitution and the way it responded to the environmental influences – temperatures, winds, humidity, rot, sunshine, smell and so on – that were believed to cause or influ-ence a particular disease.23

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Descriptions of a personʼs constitution and its interaction with environment reflected the renewed popularity of humoural theories of health alongside the emergence of more refined ways of measuring air and the development of medi-cal geography.24 In nineteenth-century New Zealand, unfavourable ideas about environment and health found widespread expression in the term miasma, which loosely referred to ʻa quality of particular environmentsʼ.25 Throughout much of the nineteenth century miasma was popularly and scientifically held respon-sible for a variety of diseases like malaria, typhoid, dysentery and diphtheria. Frequently used as a shorthand for poisoned or impure air, people believed that the ʻdecay and putrefaction of plants and animals, especially in marshy places, increases the mortality in the neighbouring countryʼ.26 Fogs, bad smells and moist low-lying ground also added to ill-health.27 In addition to wider climatic factors such as heat, humidity and sunshine, as either producers of ozone or as sources of pollution, certain vegetation could boost or hinder health. Favourable assessments of vegetation regarded particular trees as curative agents, useful in purifying stale city air, helpful in draining unhealthy areas, and efficacious in purifying water supplies. Conversely, rotting or green vegetation was thought to endanger healthiness through the generation of miasma. Hence, settlers sought to either remove or avoid vegetation associated with swamp land and in various states of decay or youth.

Surviving settler reminiscences, diaries, commissions of enquiry, newspaper columns, artwork and letters communicate a complex lexicon of health ideas based on the interaction of environments and constitutions.28 Unable to identify the unseen enemy of disease, settlers focused their attention on identifying its purported sources, placing particular importance on the appearance of areas, their attractiveness and smell. Sight as well as smell guided settlers to healthy areas or warned them about the possibility of disease. In interviews conducted by Nelsonʼs 1867 public health commission, respondents repeatedly connected bad smell with ill health, one respondent stating that ʻthe sewer from the Trafalgar [street in Nelson] occasions a bad smell: several people have been sickʼ.29

In settler ideas of health, miasma cast a long, if ironically unseen, shadow on constitutions and colonisation. Its explanatory power appealed because miasma was a common-sense concept that could be easily grasped by settlers and used to explain their bodies ̓responses to new and unknown environments. Colonists believed that atmospheric pollution emanated from natural and human sources such as rotting vegetable or animal matter, as well as stagnant, standing water and even the breath of sick persons. Fundamental to settler ideas of health was recognition that just as naturally unhealthy places existed so there were also naturally healthy sites. Dry mountain air, seaside locations and spas enjoyed great popularity as invigorating agents of health, and settlers eagerly sought these out, but the impact of humans on environments could also resound in significant ways on bodies.30 Humans could make naturally unhealthy sites such as swamps even more dangerous through pollution but, conversely, their tree planting and

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drainage could also ̒ improve ̓them – redemption was possible. In assessing the likely healthiness of new sites, then, settlers investigated their topographical location, proximity to water and the healthiness of existing inhabitants. They studied existing vegetation to indicate the salubrity of a district and its climate whilst considering the transformative properties of trees and their potential to render uninhabitable land habitable and, according to some, change local and even sometimes regional climatic patterns.

HEALTH, ENVIRONMENT AND VEGETATION

European settlers to New Zealand read the environment both as an economic resource and a barometer of their own health: changes in one effected changes in the other. Luxuriant vegetation indicated not only a moist and fecund cli-mate but also the existence of rich soils and a healthy atmosphere.31 Popular tracts and medical works on New Zealand played on this theme, emphasising the countryʼs healthiness and suitability to the ʻEnglish constitution ̓as well as its picturesque qualities and economic potential. Propaganda plumped up vast swathes of ample, flat and fertile land just waiting ʻfor the reception of manʼ.32 Strong associations in settler culture brought together appreciation of certain landscapes, ideas of healthiness and economic potential (as indicated by rich soils). Settler landscape conventions expressed ideals thought to favour both economics and health. The picturesque fashion favoured flat or gently undulat-ing agricultural land which displayed ʻthe pursuits of rural husbandry ̓and the establishment of ʻhappy smiling cottages by the way side or nestling among the trees in some “bosky deiyle” or sylvan dellʼ, powerfully transformative landscape notions expressing the cultural origins of most of New Zealandʼs nineteenth-century European migrants.33 Importantly, the kinds of environment celebrated by the picturesque were neither harmful swamplands nor rank and unkempt vegetation, doubly useless – at the same time dangerous to health and economically marginal in their ʻnatural ̓state. As celebrated through the aesthetic of the Sublime, even mountain areas, although economically useless, were thought to at least provide health benefits.34

These aesthetic and health conventions came to the fore as migrant destina-tions jostled for the settlers spilling out of Europe. In appealing for migrants, rival destinations exaggerated their own qualities and mercilessly belittled their rivals. Following Wellington s̓ two earthquakes within ten years, overseas journals presented New Zealand as the ʻshaky islesʼ, a wobbly landmass likely to slip into the ocean at any moment. New Zealand boosters hit back, enthusiastically proclaiming that New Zealandʼs climate was like Britainʼs, only better, cursed neither with its biting winter cold nor its wan summers. New Zealand also competed well with other settlement societies, they claimed, exhibiting neither Australiaʼs extraordinarily hot and parched landscapes nor Canadaʼs numbing

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coldness. Testaments like that provided by Frederick Carrington (1808?–1901), extolling New Zealandʼs climate as ʻso healthy that you can undergo wettings, and great exposures, without suffering any injurious consequencesʼ, abounded in settlement handbooks.35 Authors confidently predicted that Europeans would acclimatise as successfully, and as swiftly, as had their flourishing plants at the expense of New Zealand organisms.36 English tourist Charles Dilke spoke for many when he wrote that ʻthe English fauna and flora are peculiarly well fitted to succeed at our antipodes, because the climates of Great Britain and New Zealand are almost the same, and our men, flies, and plants – the “pick” of the whole world – have not even to encounter the difficulties of acclimatization in their struggle against the weaker growths indigenous to the soilʼ.37

The connection between vegetation and health was often explicit. According to John Wardʼs 1839 migrant handbook, New Zealandʼs climate ̒ is unquestion-ably very congenial to the European constitution. This refreshing moisture, combined with the influence of the sea-breezes, renders the climate very fa-vourable to the health, and development, of the human frame. And vegetation is, from the same cause, highly luxuriant, and the verdure almost perpetual.ʼ38 Others echoed these sentiments.39 Vegetation, then, indicated a climate suitable to the English constitution. While the ʻpuffery of settlement ̓is relatively easy to mock, climate–health ideas had a strong standing. Many migrants, includ-ing a significant number of doctors, came to New Zealand convinced that the country possessed curative properties that better suited their constitution than damp Britain or tropical Asia.40 It is not entirely uncommon to find references in settler diaries and letters to individuals like Mr Chapman, described by Dr Andrew Sinclair in 1860 as ʻa tall, thin, broken down man in constitution from the Indian military service, who snivelled in his speech from hare lip and was now endeavouring to patch up and make the best of his shattered constitution in a mild climateʼ.41 The remarkable extent of this form of promotion empha-sises the significance that settlers placed upon health and environment when determining a migration destination.

Aside from indicating a climate suitable to the English constitution, by the nineteenth century trees were also thought to possess health-giving power in and of their own right when it came to altering local environments. This applied especially to areas regarded as both naturally unhealthy, like swamps, and to sites of human-created unhealthiness like towns and cities. Popular opinion, reinforced by medical research, supported the idea of the unhealthiness of towns vis-à-vis the countryside, a stark fact reflecting the explosion of urban growth that had taken place throughout Britain.42 After the first few decades of New Zealandʼs colonisation a number of authors also discerned unacceptably high rates of disease and death in the colonyʼs settlements. Significantly, their points of reference were Britain and comparative rates of morbidity and mortality in the countryside and towns.43 Towns were generally regarded as unhealthiest because they harboured greater concentrations of putrefying animal and vegeta-

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ble matter than the countryside. Dangerous concentrations of miasma in towns, settlers believed, effectively removed important elements from the air, particu-larly ozone.44 Ozone was particularly valued as ʻthe great natural disinfectant or purifier of the atmosphere. Wherever it encounters decaying organic matter it tends to combine with and quietly burn up the bad-smelling gases which are evolved therefrom.ʼ45

In order to restore natureʼs balance sheet, settlers believed ozone should be brought to towns. In areas located near the coast, the action of wind over waves was thought to produce ozone and thus be salubrious to inhabitants.46 Similarly, highland areas near spas also signified a healthy site. But, regardless of whether an area was considered to be naturally healthy, settlers maintained that tree-planting could enhance its salubrity. Most plants, they thought, ̒ throw off ozone largely on exposure to the sunʼs rays ̓thereby acting as a ʻpowerful … atmospheric purifierʼ.47 Given that settlers could only identify the conditions that promoted healthiness, great emphasis fell on bringing ʻthe town nearer the country in appearance and healthiness ̓through activities like tree planting.48

Eucalypts were widely acknowledged not only to filter miasma from the air but also to produce ozone in abundance and have a general sanitary ef-fect on air.49 Popularised by the Australian scientist Ferdinand von Mueller (1825–1896) – ʻBaron Blue Gum ̓ to his supporters – word of its beneficial properties rapidly spread throughout the world, peaking in the 1870s.50 According to the Baron, eucalypts could successfully combat malaria in southern Europe, render habitable uninhabitable areas in California, even redeem vast wastes of malaria-poisoned land in North Africa. In Muellerʼs hands, there seemed no end to its usefulness; parts of it could be rubbed on the body, taken internally, even sniffed.51 Eucalypts proved especially popular in New Zealand from the 1860s, where they were favoured for their quick growth, utility for firewood, and health-giving properties.

In his 1880 article ʻPlanting in Townsʼ, J.B. Armstrong demanded that carbon-absorbing plants be introduced into New Zealandʼs towns for health reasons. Highlighting the qualities of ̒ the Blue Gum ̓as ̒ the most active absorber of carbon knownʼ, he also listed a number of other Australian and European species and two from New Zealand.52 Another author elaborated on the proc-ess that made trees so salubrious. ʻ[T]he treeʼ, he wrote, ʻoperates as a sponge. It sucks up all this unwholesome saturation, distils it, and exhales a part of it, purified, into the atmosphere. ̓Thus, he enthusiastically continued, ʻthe more good, wholesome trees there are about a homestead the better, provided they do not shut out the sun too much. ̓His recommendations also endorsed ʻgum trees ̓as well as ʻweeping willows or other ornamental treesʼ.53

Aside from tree planting along avenues, it was strongly believed that parks improved health. They supported the growth of plants that purified stale city air, and enabled, as one contemporary put it, ʻthe lover of flowers ̓to ʻenjoy himself, and also [provided a space] where the invalid can breathe a little fresh

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air, mingled with the perfume of the surrounding flowersʼ.54 Aromatic and at-tractive flowers were particularly prized for their ability to ̒ redeem ̓areas from the deadly grip of miasma.55 The provision of city parks, trees and open spaces together with sanitation, town planning and other public works furnished im-portant weapons in the fight against disease in European cities.56 In this sense, towns resembled human bodies – for both, adjustments were required to achieve the correct balance between inputs and outputs that best promoted health. Parks and tree planting further appealed to the spirit of the age – Romanticism – whose followers worshipped the spiritually and physically regenerative qualities of nature57 and fervently believed that bringing trees and parks into cities would counter their artificiality and their inhabitants ̓poor health.58 Belief in the restora-tive properties of nature also merged with environmental determinism59 which continued despite the emergence by the mid-nineteenth century of racial ideas based on biological difference.60 Similarly, as the nineteenth century lengthened, environments became symbols of the nation.61

Given the importance of parks in Europe, and driven by fears of replicating many of Europeʼs urban problems, even before organised European colonisation began in the late 1830s the New Zealand Company (NZC) laid out public parks and green spaces in its town plans.62 Indeed, most newly established towns in New Zealand soon had land reserved for either a public park or domain, while urban gardens, aside from their value as food producers, grew ozone-producing plants.63 For some, public spaces were crucial to the colonyʼs future.

Village greens in New Zealand, declared F. E. Wright in 1873, ʻwould have a beneficial influence on the character and stamina of the future inhabitants of the colonyʼ, and ʻshould be left in a state of nature, except that the village club might level a place for their gamesʼ.64 In the 1880s, conservationist and politi-cian Thomas Potts (1824–1888) argued along similar lines, recommending the setting aside of ʻopen spaces of land, conveniently situated, open for all, for sanitary and recreative purposesʼ. Indeed, park planting and its health-giving properties enshrined the ideals of a progressive New Zealand society intent on maximising its resources and improving both its nature and people. ʻFolks sought these shores to better themselvesʼ, explained a journalist in 1884, not ʻmerely [through] the acquisition of wealth; [but also through] the happiness of freedom and health for themselves and their childrenʼ. ʻ[A]n adequate open space or lung for the well-being of future inhabitants should be dedicated for public useʼ, declared the writer, and should form an important part ʻof rational and social progress ̓in the country.65 The author believed that environmental reform should improve the human condition, and shared with many others the aims of New Zealandʼs social reformers who proudly regarded the colony as in the vanguard of ʻrational ̓and social progress.66

While recognising the need to remove trees to make way for cultivation in rural areas, when parks and trees in urban areas were threatened with destruction, some settlers objected. In 1866, Dunedin lawyer Francis Dillon Bell (1822–1898)

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reacted angrily to council plans to lease out portions of Dunedinʼs Town Belt, originally gazetted in the 1840s before formal settlement commenced. As he explained in a letter to the local newspaper, its ʻscenery … is unsurpassed for beauty; the ground offers rare facilities for laying out with taste; and the health of the City would be immensely improved by proper use being made of these great natural advantages, and by rigidly preserving the land for the single object it was set apart for.ʼ67 Bell maintained that the leasing of the Town Belt should be prohibited on the grounds of aesthetics, health and the principles of democracy wherein a minority should not unfairly control the resources of a majority. In 1877, the eccentric artist Alfred Sharpe (1836–1908) argued that Mt Eden in Auckland city ʻcould be made far more beautiful by making serpentine walks, interspersed with trees and shrubs, and a favourite place of resort to all holiday makersʼ. Sharpe played up its closeness to the city and its ʻsalubrious airʼ.68 In 1880, Armstrong also made this connection, but in more general terms. ̒ It is to the young and vigorous treesʼ, he declared, ̒ that we must look … for health-giving properties, and fortunately these are the most beautiful.ʼ69 Aware that many had criticised the appearance of the eucalyptus, Armstrong argued that ̒ we can find beauty of a very fair class even in the Gum tribeʼ, particularly when it was so healthy.70 The ideas presented in these three examples exemplify the complexity of settler attitudes to tree planting and the provision of parks in cities.

Settlers appreciated wild nature while rejoicing in its domestication. In 1880, for instance, Sharpe implored the Auckland Domain Board to leave ʻa little bit of wild and natural woodland here and there, so as to form a contrast with the docked, cauliflowered, and artificial trees of the more open partsʼ.71 A little bit of ʻwildness ̓provided a necessary antidote to the trappings of ʻcivilisation ̓and the effects of landscape alteration. In parks and towns, settlers introduced a mixture of exotic and native plants, favouring introduced trees for street planting. These selections were based on the appearance of trees and their suitability for planting, rather than the later European identification of New Zealandʼs indig-enous species as a native and national nature.72 A commonly heard refrain in the nineteenth century was the connection between beauty, morality and spiritual health, which many settlers expressed in terms of the regenerative qualities of the bush. As William Swainson observed, ʻhealth … as well as amusement, is gained by a journey in the bushʼ. After ̒ a stint in the bush ̓the traveller ̒ returns from his journey a stronger and a better manʼ. 73 Such enthusiasm for the natural world was commonplace, revealing not only a gendered reading of the New Zealand environment and its relationship to masculinity, but also the actuality that New Zealandʼs European colonisation commenced just when romanticism was at its most popular.74 Expressing similar sentiments to Swainson, one time New Zealand Minister of Lands, Robert McNab, speculated that the ʻpurity of … atmosphere, humidity ̓ and temperature regularity of forestlands ʻmay be what makes employment in the forest so healthy an occupationʼ.75 For the Presbyterian Christian Outlook magazine, Arbor Day ʻis a force that makes for

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Christianityʼ, developing and culturing childrenʼs ʻfiner tastes ̓better ʻthan the dry curriculum of books and standardsʼ.76 What connected these ideas was not only a firm belief in the therapeutics of landscape and trees but also a belief that open-air exercise and work were morally and spiritually uplifting as well as physically healthy.77

Conservation of existing bush areas, the creation of parks, and the activity of tree planting demonstrate the significant role thought to be played by trees in influencing local health and the character of settlers. Some authors went even further, holding that tree-planting if undertaken over a large enough area could act as an atmospheric purifier on a regional scale and influence regional climatic patterns. In 1886, William Wells echoed the arguments of a number of other authors regarding the influence of forests. Reading a paper before the Nelson Philosophical Society, he stated that tree-planting around Nelson would, first, increase rainfall, thereby enhancing the regionʼs fertility by expanding the area of agricultural production; second, improve the regionʼs healthiness by sucking impurities from the air and regulating water supplies within the Nelson water catchment; and third, provide a profitable source of wood if sustainably managed according to the practices of scientific forestry.78 Wells upheld what Richard Grove has termed a dessiccationist discourse, the identification of the moral and ecological importance of forest conservation and tree planting to human health and society.79 According to this argument, which garnered strong support in nineteenth-century New Zealand conservation circles, proponents expressed anxieties about the frightening effects of deforestation in accelerating climate change and sand drift, in hastening soil erosion and flooding, and, not least, in precipitating a disastrous timber famine that threatened to choke colonial devel-opment. As part of this sophisticated argument, proponents drew attention to the significance of forests in maintaining agriculture – believed to be the bedrock upon which commerce and other institutions rested – and furnished examples drawn from the Biblical lands and more recent colonial history of deforestation causing the collapse of civilisations.80 Images of a fertile, well-watered land and a healthy environment came together in this potent landscape vision.

Tree planting in rural areas could certainly help drain unhealthy areas.81 In towns they also provided valuable storehouses of water, ʻhelp[ing] to regulate the water supply, produce a more sustained feeding of springs ̓and lower the risk of flooding and land slips.82 David Tannock (1873–1952), Dunedinʼs Su-perintendent of Reserves, actively promoted tree planting throughout that cityʼs watersheds for exactly those reasons, directing tree planting ʻat the rate of 40 to 50 acres per annum ̓in 1908.83

VEGETATION AS AN AMBIGUOUS MARKER OF HEALTH

Just as certain species – like pines and eucalypts – attracted praise for their remarkable health-giving properties, so others – like the swamp plant, raupo, or

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trees which flourished in too great a profusion – marked an unhealthy site. This fearful stance towards vegetation reflected longer-standing attitudes towards trees and health. Kenneth Thompson has dated these pessimistic attitudes to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this period, European and North American thinkers believed that trees, by impeding the free passage of air, kept air stagnant and therefore endangered public health, and that deforestation also released long-dormant miasma. According to Thompson, European and Ameri-can attitudes began to change in the late eighteenth century and into the next, whereby the therapeutic and prophylactic value of trees ʻwas firmly implanted in both lay and medical opinion.ʼ84 Yet evidence in New Zealand, Australia and tropical colonies suggests that attitudes towards trees were far more complex than Thompson implies, and that much overlap and some dispute existed regarding the qualities of particular trees.

Unsurprisingly, old vegetation elicited fears of decomposition and poison associated with the production of miasma. Older plants ̒ lose their carbon-absorb-ing properties when old and decayingʼ, noted Armstrong, ̒ and consequently all town trees should be removed as soon as they show signs of decayʼ.85 Younger trees, because of their greater carbon absorbing power, figured as the most recommended plantings, yet if too young or located in too great a profusion, they too could be dangerous. This attitude is exemplified by New Plymouthʼs Colonial Surgeon, Peter Wilson, who believed that young green timber along with a poorly chosen site caused what he diagnosed in 1847 to be typhoid fever.86 By 1860, Wilson had changed his diagnosis to typhus fever, but not his belief in its source. According to him, this originated in ̒ a malaria proceeding, I believe, from the moist rotting, or dry decaying of the timbers of dwellings … and not improbably strengthened in the degree of its poisoning influence by the oozing of indoor soil emanations alsoʼ.87

The profusion and appearance of living trees and vegetation also elicited anxiety. Europeans living in tropical places knew from experience and medical advice that heat endangered health. It disrupted constitutions, induced lethargy and generated sickness. According to a ̒ discourse of tropicality ̓that developed in the nineteenth century, moisture and heat formed a deadly combination, ac-celerating the decomposition of vegetable and animal matter, and rendering it immensely dangerous for Europeans inhabiting humid forested and swampy areas. Jungles – with such disorder and profusion, vibrancy and colour – not only threatened the ideals of civilisation but also the health of any inhabitant foolhardy enough to live there.88 A European surgeon typified such ambiguity, describing Trincomalee (in present-day Sri Lanka) as ʻa beautiful place, like flowers on one[ʼ]s coffinʼ.89 Any environment resembling tropical nature could therefore prove dangerous, even if it was located in a largely temperate country such as New Zealand.

In 1869, Hokitikaʼs Surgeon Superintendent identified an outbreak of yel-low fever, a disease often associated with tropical environments, on the South

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Islandʼs West Coast.90 Its cause, he explained, was ̒ excessive moisture, swampy grounds, absence of cultivation and drainage, and a bush resembling the jungles of the tropics – [which existed] in greater abundance here than in any other part of New Zealandʼ.91 His discussion reveals the nexus thought to exist between tropical environments (swamps, moisture and bush), human action (draining and cultivation), and health.

Growing concerns were also being aired about the unhealthiness of New Zealandʼs towns.92 Based on interviews, and consultations of both text books and vital statistics, Nelsonʼs 1867 commission concluded that pollution, over-flowing and soaking cesspools, dusty streets and naturally swampy land had conspired to create ill-health. In particular, it highlighted the ʻso called “preventative diseases,” being such as [caused] by decaying vegetable and animal matters, and the gases they give off polluting air and waterʼ.93 To improve this parlous situation, the Commission recommended a number of sanitary improvements, including the removal of dangerous vegetation, especially ʻall long growth of shrubs, flax, raupo, bushes, tussock, or other rank vegetationʼ. The purpose of these measures was ʻto lay the mud open to sun and air, and prevent it from being a source of damp exhalationʼ.94 Penalties for pollution had also been tried earlier; legislation introduced in 1863, for instance, levied a penalty of £50 for anyone fouling or corrupting the waterways near the town, typical of such local measures enacted at this time, but not always successfully.95

Ironically, European suspicion of swamps and their vegetation contrasted with Maori experience of these areas.96 To Maori, swamps teemed with life and resources, providing sources of food and materials, besides serving as centres of communal activity. To many Europeans, in contrast, they harboured death and disease; they were sites that needed to be drained, sites that needed to be made useful and productive.97 As Geoff Park explains, in the quest for flat agricul-tural land and for better routes of communication, the colonial transformation of New Zealandʼs environment exacted its heaviest toll on the lowlands.98 Yet, Maori actions towards swamps were also changing in the nineteenth century. Drainage took place on Maori land due to marginalisation and indebtedness, but also sometimes through choice, while a number of Maori laboured drain-ing other swamps.99 More research is required into the extent and motivations of Maori swamp drainage and the role played by health ideas in effecting such changes.100

GERM THEORY AND INSTITUTIONAL LANDSCAPES

By the twentieth century – in Australasian medical circles at least – ideas about disease transmission were gradually turning away from miasmic models towards acceptance of microbial theories. ̒ Germ ̓theories acknowledged humans rather than environments as sources of disease.101 In popular circles, however, miasmic

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ideas persisted longer.102 But despite the gradual acceptance of germ theory in medical circles, environmental cures retained significance in medical care through their use in therapeutics, as clearly demonstrated in the areas of mental health care, sanatorium design and eugenics.103

In the nineteenth century, the ̒ moral treatment ̓emerged as a possible means of effecting cure in the mentally ill. The moral treatment prescribed attractive environments, rest, work, exercise, good nutrition and recreational activities for the mentally ill, activities ʻdesigned to promote self-healing by enhancing self-esteem and building moral valuesʼ.104 Influential books like John Conol-lyʼs The Construction and Government of Lunatic Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane (1847) typified thinking about the importance of landscape in the mental health ʻcureʼ. For asylums accepting ʻpatients of the educated classesʼ, Conolly recommended that they should ʻbe situated amidst scenery calculated to give pleasure to such persons when of sane mindʼ. Although Conolly argued – in common with the time – that only the educated could appreciate and be moved by scenery, he recognised that: ʻEven in the populous city, the pent-up artisan has a bird, to sing to him whilst he works, and a few flowers, which he cultivates with careʼ. Thus, he argued: ʻWe must not neglect such instincts and capacities if we profess to cure ̓the insane in asylums.105 The popularity of such ideas continued. Later that century, Charles Mercierʼs Lunatic Asylums: Their Organisation and Management (1894) introduced the then-fashionable style of the picturesque pleasure garden into asylum landscape design. A ha-ha and low wall with plantings not only improved the appearance of such areas, asserted Mercier, but also ʻtake off from the contracted appearance of the court and diminish the suggestion of restraint that is offered by the wallʼ.106

Considerations of pleasant, ̒ natural ̓surroundings, combined with the restora-tive properties of male manual labour, came to the fore in New Zealand through Frederick Truby Kingʼs (1858–1938) policies instituted at Seacliff Asylum, Otago, where he was appointed Superintendent in 1889. Reflecting the emerging emphasis on ʻmoral treatment ̓in mental health circles, King viewed open air exercise and pleasant garden landscape as crucial to the successful treatment of the mentally ill. Both, he argued, removed the feeling of restraint and provided a sense of purpose to the lives of inmates. Soon after his appointment, King em-ployed a landscape gardener to re-design and beautify Seacliffʼs grounds (figure 1). He also engaged patients in work on the hospitalʼs grounds and on its farm.107 The latter provided an important source of fresh produce, another cornerstone of Kingʼs therapeutic programme, as well as enabling the institution to be ef-fectively self-sufficient.108 In the late nineteenth century, reports by the Inspector of Asylums, Duncan MacGregor, attested both to the success of Kingʼs schemes and to the ever-improving beauty of what King was increasingly referring to as ʻthe estate ̓on the health of its mental patients. MacGregor could not ̒ praise too highly the vigour which is manifest in laying out the grounds and developing the farmʼ. ̒ Every yearʼ, he continued, ̒ adds to the beauty and productiveness of

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Seacliff, and as a residence for the insane the position is admirable.ʼ109 Beauty, productiveness and health thus formed a powerful triumvirate in the fight against ill health, and could redeem societyʼs marginalised. Enthusiastic tree planter that King was, though, his thinking also reflected earlier notions that trees should not be too densely planted. As he explained, ̒ lofty evergreens are always out of place from the point of view of health, vitality and happiness of human beings, if they intercept seriously the free access of direct sunlight to the buildings and the adjoining paths, flower-borders and lawns. 1̓10

By the early twentieth century, calls rang out for the state to establish another kind of institution – the tuberculosis sanatorium – and to prevent the entry to New Zealand of migrants suffering from this disease.111 Fears about deadly mi-grants were not without foundation.112 While immigration restrictions attempted to prevent the influx of consumptive patients into the colony, a similar kind of isolation was thought to check the spread of tuberculosis within New Zealand, having the added bonus of subjecting the patient to the benefits of New Zealandʼs climate and, to a lesser extent, healthy trees.

The colonyʼs first sanatorium opened in 1899, at Flagstaff, near Dunedin. More soon followed.113 Like their counterparts overseas, sanatoria buildings in New Zealand had windows, vents and French doors that opened to let in as much fresh air and sunshine as possible. Of course, in winter they would allow

FIGURE 1. This image, probably taken in 1912, graphically illustrates the development of Seacliff Hospital into a landscape garden under Frederick Truby Kingʼs management and the connection between health and environment. ̒ Waikouaiti Co. Seacliff. Hospitalʼ, ca. 1912, from Miss J. Johnston Collection, F- 60807-1/2, PAColl-8769-02, Alexander

Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

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in snow as well as sunshine, coldness as well as heat. Extensive gardens for food and decoration were also developed. In visiting such sites one is struck by the impressive stands of Eurasian species still growing there. In these plantations, pines seem to have proved especially popular because of their perceived role in purifying air and thereby in purifying diseased lungs.114 Site, though, was of greater importance than vegetation. Invariably sanatoria were located in high, dry, isolated, inland positions.115 Waipiata (established in 1924), on the Maniototo Plain, typified the ideal. Located at 1600 feet, it averaged less than 20 inches per year of rainfall and less than 70 per cent humidity.116 Although sanatoria combined good diet with graduated exercise, health education with occasional surgery and, finally from the late 1940s, vaccination with BCG (Bacillus Cal-mette-Guérin), climate determined their location, and environment in general played an important part in therapy until the 1940s and 1950s.117

By the early 1900s, New Zealand was one of the most urbanised countries in the world, and its settlers had realised that the old world serpents of urbanised industrial society – pollution, disease, overcrowding and filth – had followed them to paradise. What was more, urbanisation appeared to be affecting birth rates. Canterbury College Professor John Macmillan Brown typified such anxieties, drawing readers ̓attention to ̒ the appearance of slums and vice ̓in the colony and to the ̒ decadence ̓of the white race whose ̒ fountains of population and talentʼ, he roared, were ʻdrying upʼ.118 In these anxious decades, state involvement in health grew through the establishment of the Public Health Department. Embrac-ing germ theory, its medical experts also looked to nature as an inspiration and a source of healthiness. In 1902, medical doctor Robert Makgill (1870–1946) spoke for many when he wrote that ʻNature has framed certain sanitary laws more far-reaching than any by-laws [which] the most exemplary local body ever conceivedʼ. In his views, these included elimination of the unfit, the removal of sanitary waste onto fields, knowledge about the microbe, and the sanitary powers of sunlight and fresh air.119 For Makgill, the discovery of the microbe did not diminish the role of environment in causing and explaining patterns of disease but rather modified it to one providing both therapeutic benefits and a model which ʻmodern ̓science could draw upon to fight ill health.120

A renewed emphasis on environmental therapeutics also saw the development of new urban forms which complemented the many parks already established throughout New Zealandʼs cities. Foremost among these were the emergence of the Garden City movement and widespread projects of civic beautifying, typified by such groups as the Dunedin and Suburban Reserves Conservation Society established in 1888, New Zealandʼs first. In many respects, both rep-resented a continuation of existing beliefs in gardens as sites of restoration and recuperation. The emergence of tramways in much of New Zealandʼs main cities before the First World War enabled many middle-class families to now live on the edge of the town in specially designed estates that incorporated aspects of gardens in their designs.121 Amenity improvements in towns involved a variety

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of measures, from the development of more urban parks to the provision of childrenʼs playing grounds and the ʻamenity ̓planting of decorative species.122

In this period, anxieties about declining birth rates and even physical dete-rioration sparked the establishment of other types of programmes incorporating environmental therapeutics. Some of these involved children s̓ and adults ̓organi-sations and government programmes that aimed to improve the healthiness of New Zealanders.123 In state schools, experimental gardens and farms attempted to improve the morals and mould the psychological development of young New Zealanders, as well as engender notions of self-improvement, by getting them in touch with nature. School curricula during this period also came to emphasise the significant moral and health benefits of natural history collecting.124 Indeed, even classroom architecture was opened up to embrace the qualities of sunshine and fresh air: at Waitaki Boys School in Oamaru, cold baths, swims and runs, and ʻopen-air dormitories with adjustable canvas flaps ̓allowing the ingress of fresh air, and even snow, typified the experience of many youngsters at school in this period and after.125 By the 1930s childrenʼs health camps were receiving thousands of sickly children and exposing them to the therapeutics of good diet, fresh air, sunshine, regimen and exercise. The Sunlight League of New Zealand also emerged in this decade, exalting not only in the rehabilitative properties of outdoor exercise and climate, but also the creation of cleaner skies.126

CONCLUSION

Charting the ambiguous history of settler attitudes to vegetation and health in nineteenth century Aotearoa underlines the complexity of colonists ̓engage-ment with new landscapes, of confidence mixed with anxiety, hope grafted onto despair. Nineteenth-century discussions about the colonyʼs climatic suitability to the ʻEnglish constitution ̓relied on observations of existing and introduced vegetation to indicate the healthiness of a given area. As settlement progressed, the role of trees and parks in urban settings promised to enhance health by mak-ing urban places more like the healthier countryside – thanks, in part, to the supposed role of trees, as producers of ozone, in purifying stale city air. Yet, trees of different age and type could be ambiguous markers of health. Older trees were feared because of their association with the production of miasma, as were swamp plants, while young green timbers could, under certain envi-ronmental conditions, generate ill health. By the twentieth century, concepts of environmental therapeutics were generally subsumed within eugenic theories that also looked to the influence of hereditary factors on health, or to tuber-culosis treatment in which climate and exercise formed one aspect of a wider programme of health. In this period, too, childrenʼs health camps, along with the burgeoning Garden City movement and civic beautifying societies, continued the emphasis on environmental therapeutics. By presenting a broad overview

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of the vegetation-health nexus, I hope to stimulate more fine-grained studies that will suggest points of comparison between different colonies, investigate Maori-European knowledge transfers, and also pay closer attention to regional differences. Were treeless areas treated differently to forested regions? Was a coastal town thought to be healthier than one inland? Where they could, did the wealthy choose to live on hill sites rather than on the flat? Such studies will, I am sure, reveal both considerable confidence and anxiety about the role of environment in shaping colonial health.127

NOTES1 I thank the following for reading this paper or discussing aspects of it with me: John P. Adam, Dr Warwick Brunton, Professor Barbara Einhorn, Ondine Godtschalk, Dr Geoff Park, Professor Eric Pawson, Dr Paul Star, Associate Professor John Stenhouse, Associ-ate Professor Pamela Wood. I especially thank my Department of History colleagues, Waikato University, for their collegiality, critical reviewing and support. Thanks also to the two anonymous Environment and History reviewers for helpful suggestions and constructive criticism.2 J. B. Armstrong, ̒ Planting in Townsʼ, New Zealand Country Journal (hereinafter NZCJ) 4 (1 January 1880): 49.3 The Hauraki Plains are located in Waikato, northern New Zealand. Much of the plains were swampland, which was subsequently drained after colonisation.4 James Preece, ʻMissionary Papers. Documents which relate to James Preece, lay mis-sionary in New Zealand ̓(unpublished MS: July 1999 and January 2000), 22. Thanks to Dr. Marjan Lousburg for bringing this to my attention.5 Gregg Mitman, ̒ In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental Historyʼ, Environmental History 10 (2005): 185 (quotation). On overseas scholarship, note Richard White, ̒ From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural Turn in Environ-mental Historyʼ, The Historian 66 (2004): 557–64, doi:10.1111/j.1540-6563.2004.00089.x; Nicholaas A. Rupke, ed., Medical Geography in Historical Perspective (London: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, 2000); Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Hazel Conway, People s̓ Parks: The Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Mingzheng Shi, ʻFrom Imperial Gardens to Public Parks: the Transformation of Urban Space in Early Twentieth-Century Beijingʼ, Modern China 24, 3 (1998): 219–54, doi:10.1177/009770049802400301; Caroline Daley, ʻA Gendered Domain: Leisure in Auckland 1890–1940ʼ, in Caroline Daely and Deborah Montgomerie, ed., The Gendered Kiwi (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999), 87–111; Sarah Mirans, ʻ“For their Moral Health”: James Barrett, Urban Progressive Ideas and National Park Reservation in Victoriaʼ, Australian Historical Studies 120 (2000): 249–66; Terence Young, ʻSocial Reform Through Parks: The American Civic Associationʼs Program for a Better Americaʼ, Journal of Historical Geography 22, 4 (1996): 460–72, doi:10.1006/jhge.1996.0032.6 Pamela J. Wood, Dirt: Filth and Decay in a New World Arcadia (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2005); Linda Bryder, ̒ “A Health Resort for Consumptives”: Tuberculosis and Immigration to New Zealand, 1880–1914ʼ, Medical History 40 (1996): 459–64.

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7 F. S. Maclean, Challenge for Health: A History of Public Health in New Zealand (Wel-lington: Government Printer, 1964); Derek A. Dow, Safeguarding the Public Health: A History of the New Zealand Department of Health (Wellington: Victoria University Press; Ministry of Health; Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, 1995); Michael Peter Belgrave, ʻ“Medical Men” and “Lady Doctors”: The Making of a New Zealand Profession, 1867–1941 ̓(Ph.D. diss., Victoria University of Wellington, 1985), 144–51; Belgrave, ̒ Medicine and the Rise of Health Professionals in New Zealand, 1860–1939ʼ, in A Healthy Country: Essays on the Social History of Medicine in New Zealand, ed. Linda Bryder (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1991), 7–24; Tom Brooking, A History of Dentistry in New Zealand (Dunedin: New Zealand Dental Association, 1980).8 Bronwyn Labrum, ̒ Looking Beyond the Asylum: Gender and the Process of Committal in Auckland, 1870-1910ʼ, New Zealand Journal of History 26 (1992): 125–44; Barbara Brookes, ʻWomen and Madness: A Case-Study of the Seacliff Asylum, 1890-1920ʼ, in Barbara Brookes, Charlotte Macdonald and Margaret Tennant, eds., Women in History 2 (Wellington: Bridget William Books, 1992), 129–47; Barbara Brookes and Jane Thom-son, ed., ʻUnfortunate Folkʼ: Essays on Mental Health Treatment, 1863–1992 (Otago: University of Otago Press, 2001). The Australasian context is also being brought to schol-arly attention: Catharine Coleborne is working on a book, Madness in the Family: The Australasian Colonial World, Insanity and Institutions, 1860s–1914. On its institutional history, note: Warwick Anthony Brunton, ʻ“A Choice of Difficulties”: National Mental Health Policy in New Zealand, 1840–1947 (Ph.D. diss., University of Otago, 2001).9 On race, note: John Stenhouse, ̒ “A Disappearing Race Before We Came Here”: Doctor Alfred Kingcome Newman, ʻThe Dying Maori, and Victorian Scientific Racismʼ, New Zealand Journal of History 20, (1996): 124–40; Malcolm Nicolson, ʻMedicine and Ra-cial Politics: Changing Images of the New Zealand Maori in the Nineteenth Centuryʼ, in David Arnold, ed., Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies (Manchester: Man-chester University Press, 1988), 66–104; Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa, ̒ “The Power of the Physician”: Doctors and the “Dying Maori” in early Colonial New Zealandʼ, Health and History 3 (2001): 13–40; Derek A. Dow, Maori Health and Government Policy, 1840–1940 (Wellington: Victoria University Press; Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, 1999); Raeburn Lange, May the People Live: A History of Maori Health Development, 1900–1920 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999).10 With the exception of Philippa Mein Smithʼs Concise History of New Zealand (Cam-bridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), most general histories of New Zealand either ignore health aspects of colonisation or relegate it to a peripheral role.11 While historical geographers such as Andrew Hill Clark and, later, Graeme Wynn, Mike Roche, Eric Pawson and Alan Grey have investigated New Zealandʼs environmental past, the emergence of environmental history in New Zealand has been marked in recent years by the publication of three important works: Eric Pawson and Tom Brooking, ed., Environmental Histories of New Zealand (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002); special issue of Environment and History 9, 4 (2003) on New Zealand; Tony Ballantyne and Judith Bennett, ed., Landscape/Community: Perspectives from New Zealand History (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2005).12 For exceptions, note James Beattie, ʻW.L. Lindsay, Scottish Environmentalism, Webs of Information, and the “Improvement” of nineteenth-century New Zealandʼ, in Landscape/Community, 43–56.

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13 Thomas F. Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility of the Line (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999). On the implications of boundary making between science, religion and environmental history, note James Beattie, ʻRethinking Science, Religion and Nature in Environmental History: Drought in Early Twentieth-Century New Zealand, Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 29, 3 (2004): 82–103.14 On which see, Eric Pawson, ʻOn the Edge: Making Urban Placesʼ, in Environmental Histories, 200–13; James Beattie, ʻAlfred Sharpe, Australasia and Ruskinʼ, Journal of New Zealand Art History 29 (2006): 38–56.15 Alan Grey, Aotearoa and New Zealand: A Historical Geography (Christchurch: Can-terbury University Press, 1994), 23.16 On the former, see Peter Gibbons, ʻThe Far Side of the Search for Identity: Recon-sidering New Zealand Historyʼ, New Zealand Journal of History 37, (2003): 38–47 and Giselle Byrnes, Boundary Markers: Land Surveying and the Colonisation of New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2001); on the latter, note Geoff Park, Nga Uruora: The Groves of Life: History and Ecology (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1996); Pawson and Brooking, Environmental Histories of New Zealand.17 The ̒ Homeopathic Echo: ̓A Journal of Health and Disease, was edited by C.F. Fischer, and published in Auckland in the years 1855 and 1856; Jennifer M. Gray, ̒ Potions, Pills and Poisons: Quackery in New Zealand, circa 1900–1915 ̓(B.A. Honours diss.: University of Otago, 1980); Derek Dow, ʻ“Pruned of its dangers”: The Tohunga Suppression Act 1907ʼ, Health and History 3 (2001): 41–64; John Adam and Louise Beaumont, ̒ Colonial Pharamcological [sic] Gardens: New Zealandʼs First Plant Collections. A Progress Report for The Stanley (UK) Horticultural Trust ̓(No place: unpublished report, 2007).18 This relationship also goes some way towards explaining why so many leading natu-ralists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were medically-trained doctors and why medical classificatory systems of disease were strongly influenced by botanical taxonomy. On which, see Beattie, ʻW.L. Lindsayʼ.19 See, Ashley Hay, Gum: The Story of Eucalyptus and Their Champions (Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 2002); Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930 (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1999), 69–70.20 The French-born nursing nun, Mother Mary Aubert enthusiastically explored the medical potential of New Zealandʼs plants by preparing and selling herbal remedies commercially (initially in conjunction with Kempthorne, Prosser and Co., Wanganui), and using them for the care of many Maori to whom she ministered. Robin Woodward, Cultivating Paradise: Aspects of Napier s̓ Botanical History (Napier: Hawkeʼs Bay Cultural Trust, 2002), 41–7; also, note, R.C. Cooper and R.C. Cambie, New Zealand s̓ Economic Native Plants (Auckland; New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 116–31.21 As medical historian Michael Belgrave notes, only by the 1880s was public confidence increasing in ʻprofessional ̓medicine to the extent that many doctors were now able to ply their trade. Prior to this decade demand for medical professionals was so low that many doctors were forced to seek alternative employment. Belgrave, ʻ“Medical Men” and “Lady Doctors”ʼ, 145–6.22 Colonial smallpox vaccination among Maori, for instance, prevented the disease having the same impact on Maori populations as it had on other indigenous peoples.

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23 See, Valencius, ʻHistories of Medical Geographyʼ, in Medical Geography in Histori-cal Perspective, 3–28.24 Ideas in this paragraph are based on: G.E.R. Lloyd, ʻIntroductionʼ, in Hippocratic Writings, ed. G.E.R. Lloyd, trans. J. Chadwick and W.N. Mann (New York and London: Penguin, 1983 [1950]), 9–61; Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990 [1967]); Caroline Hannaway, ̒ Environ-ment and Miasmataʼ, in W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter, ed., Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, Volume 1 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 292–308.25 Linda Nash, ʻFinishing Nature: Harmonizing Bodies and Environments in Late-Nineteenth Century Californiaʼ, Environmental History 8 (2003): 36, doi:10.2307/3985971.26 ʻOur Science Page: Decay of Plants and Animalsʼ, NZCJ 7, 6 (1 November, 1883), p.491. 27 Carlo M. Cipolla, Miasmas and Disease: Public Health and the Environment in the Pre-Industrial Age, trans. Elizabeth Potter (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992); Mary Dobson, ̒ “Marsh Fever” – the Geography of Malaria in Englandʼ, Journal of Historical Geography 6 (1980): 357–89, doi:10.1016/0305-7488(80)90145-0.28 Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Un-derstood Themselves and their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002).29 Webb, cited in New Zealand Government Gazette (Province of Nelson) 15, 26 (9 July 1867): 101. Many settlers connected bad smell with ill health; this was a common means of identifying unhealthy sites at that time. On this, see Alain Corbinʼs brilliant, Le Mi-asme et la Jonquille: Lʼodorat et lʼimaginaire social XVIIIe–XIXe siècles (Manchecourt: Maury Eurolivres, 2000 [1986]).30 On the connection between health resorts and tourism, see Margaret McClure, The Wonder Country: Making New Zealand Tourism (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2004).31 On the mistaken idea that vegetation indicated productive soils see Vaughan Wood, ̒ Ap-praising Soil Fertility in Early Colonial New Zealand: The “Biometric Fallacy” and Beyondʼ, Environment and History 9 (2003): 393–406, doi:10.3197/096734003129342890.32 Otago Journal 5 (1848): 66.33 Reverend Thomas Burns to Captain William Cargill, Portobello, 6 February 1847. MS 0076, Dunedin: Hocken Library, New Zealand.34 On which, see Beattie, ʻAlfred Sharpe, Australasia and Ruskinʼ, 38–56; Beattie, ʻWilderness Found, Lost and Restored: The Sublime and Picturesque in New Zealandʼ, in Richard Reeve and Nick Abbott, eds., The Future of Wilderness in New Zealand, forthcoming.35 Frederick Carrington, Scheme of the Colony of the Free Church at Otago, New Zealand (Glasgow: Scottish Guardian Office, 1845), 18–9.36 The great irony, of course, is that many of these ʻEuropean ̓plants in fact came from Asia and the Americas. On the promotion of New Zealand, see Marian Minson, ̒ Promo-tional Shots: the New Zealand Companyʼs Paintings, Drawings and Prints of Wellington in the 1840s and Their Use in Selling a Colonyʼ, in Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the Colonial Dream: A Reconsideration (Wellington, 1997), 159–66; Judith Anne Johnston,

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ʻImages and Appraisals of New Zealand, 1839–1855: A Cognitive-Behavioural Approach to Historical Geographyʼ(Ph.D. diss.: University of Auckland, 1975); Miles Fairburn, The Ideal Society and Its Enemies: The Foundations of Modern New Zealand Society, 1850–1900 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1989); Ian D. Pool, ̒ Is New Zealand a Healthy Country?ʼ, New Zealand Population Review 8, 2 (1982): 2–27; James Beattie, ʻLusting After a Lost Arcadia: European Environmental Perception in Otago, 1840–1860 ̓(Post-Grad. diss., University of Otago, 1999), 100–13; Paul Star, ʻThe Place of Native Forest in New Zealandʼs Mental Landscapeʼ, in John Dargavel and Brenda Libbis, eds., Australia s̓ Ever-Changing Forests IV: Proceedings of the Fourth National Conference on Australian Forest History (Canberra: CRES, 1999), 85–98.37 Charles Dilke, Travellers ̓Tales of Early Australia & New Zealand: Greater Britain, Charles Dilke visits her new lands, 1866 & 1867, ed. Geoffrey Blainey (North Ryde [N.S.W.]: Methuen Haynes, 1985 [1868]), 76–7.38 John Ward, Information Relative to New-Zealand for the Use of Colonists (London: John W. Parker, 1839), 10.39 For instance, The Otago Journal claimed that Otago had some 140 species of fern, so could be judged to possess a fecund and healthy climate that enjoyed ʻequitable ̓year-round mildness, ʻrefreshing dews and rains, and … temperate heat [which], fill the months with a living verdureʼ, Otago Journal 5 (1848): 67.40 Beattie, ̒ Temperate New Zealand and Tropical Asia: Health and Conservation Connec-tions, 1840–1920ʼ, in Henry Johnson and Brian Moloughney, eds., Asia in the Making of New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2007), 41–6; L.K. Gluckman, Tangiwai – A Medical History of New Zealand Prior to 1860 (Auckland: L.K. Gluck-man, 1976), 57, 61.41 Andrew Sinclair, Letters and Journals, March 1860, no page. MS 1947. Wellington: Alexander Turnbull Library. New Zealand.42 Of course, these perceptions had a strong basis in reality. See, Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).43 New Zealand Government Gazette (Province of Nelson) 15, 26 (9 July 1867): 102.44 ʻOur Science Page: Decay of Plants and Animals (from the “Chemistry of Common Things”)ʼ, NZCJ 7, 6 (1 November 1883): 494.45 Ibid.46 Believing that ozone formed closest to the surface, health seekers maximised their exposure to it by staying as close to the surface of the sea as possible. Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker, The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth (London: Secker & War-burg, 1999), 113–38; Woods ʻConstructing Colonial Dirt: A Cultural History of Dirt in the Nineteenth Century Settlement of Dunedin, New Zealand ̓(Ph.D. diss., University of Otago, 1997), 67–8.47 NZCJ 1, 2 (2 April 1877): 82. For similar arguments, see also, ʻSanitary Influence of Treesʼ, North New Zealand Settler (hereinafter NNZS) 1, 4 (November 1882): 69; R. Aherne, ʻUtilization of Sandhills Reserveʼ, NZCJ 6, 6 (1 November 1882): 406; ʻBen-eficial Effects of Forestsʼ, NZCJ 14, 6 (November 1890): 520; R. McNab, ʻForestry in Its Relation to the Farmʼ, New Zealand Farmer (hereinafter, NZF) 24, 10 (November 1903): 788.48 Armstrong, ʻPlanting in Townsʼ: 53.

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49 Kenneth Thompson, ʻTrees as a Theme in Medical Geography and Public Healthʼ, Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 54, 3 (1975): 518–23 (quotation, 521).50 For a lively chapter on the Baron, see Hay, Gum, 71–103. On its anti-malarial proper-ties note especially, Hay, Gum, 88–90.51 Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, endnote 18 from page 23, referenced on 69–70; see also Thompson, ʻTrees as a Themeʼ, 524. Its anti-malarial properties generally went unchallenged until the late 1890s, when the importance of the host, the Anopheles mos-quito, in transferring malaria was discovered. Michael Warboys, ̒ Germs, Malaria and the Invention of Mansonial Tropical Medicine: From “Diseases in the Tropics” to “Tropical Diseases”ʼ, in David Arnold, ed., Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500–1900 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 186–98.52 These included ̒ the various varieties of Poplar, the Maples, Planes, Elms, &cʼ, the Tas-manian Wattle, Stringy-bark gum and ̒ the Willow-leaved gum and the Peppermint gumʼ, but also included native beeches and Ribbonwoods. Armstrong, ʻPlantingʼ, 50–3.53 ʻSanitary Influence of Treesʼ, NNZS 1, 4 (November 1882): 69.54 New Zealand Herald (NZH), 21 May 1880, 6.55 NZCJ 1, 2 (2 April 1877): 82. See also, ʻSanitary Influence of Treesʼ, 69; R. Aherne, ʻUtilization of Sandhills Reserveʼ, NZCJ 6, 6 (1 November 1882): 406; ʻBeneficial Ef-fects of Forests ̓NZCJ 14, 6 (November 1890): 520; R. McNab, ̒ Forestry in Its Relation to the Farmʼ, NZF 24, 10 (November 1903): 788.56 On this note, for instance, H.E. Meller, Leisure and the Changing City, 1870–1914 (London/Boston: Routledge & Paul, 1976), 109–17. See also M. Billinge, ʻA Time and Place for Everything: An Essay on Recreation, Re-Creation and the Victoriansʼ, Journal of Historical Geography 22 (1996): 443–59, doi:10.1006/jhge.1996.0031.57 On this vast literature note, for example, Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Collins, 1996); Peter Gay, The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, Volume IV (Glasgow: Harper Collins, 1998); H.G. Schenck, The Mind of the European Romantic: An Essay in Cultural History (London: Constable, 1966).58 For this theme, note, Fairburn, Ideal Society; Miles Fairburn, ̒ The Rural Myth and the New Urban Frontier: An Approach to New Zealand Social History, 1870–1940ʼ, New Zealand Journal of History 9 (1975): 3–21; James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Penguin: Auckland; Allen Lane: London, 1996); Julian Kuzma, ̒ Landscape, Literature and Identity: New Zealand Late Colonial Literature as Environmental Text, 1890–1921 ̓(Ph.D. diss., University of Otago, 2003).59 See, for instance, Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific in the Wake of the Cook Voyages (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press at the Miegunyah Press, 1992).60 Previously it was thought that environment determined morals and character, and that over time this accounted for human difference. Still, the power of environments con-tinued; the belief that races could never successfully adapt to environments different to their own meant that if they went to a different climate, they risked racial degeneracy. Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). On the implication of these ideas in New Zealand, note Beattie, ʻTemperate New Zealand and Tropical Asiaʼ.

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61 Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, ̒ All of Germany a Garden? Changing Ideas of Wilderness in German Garden Design and Landscape Architectureʼ, in Nature in German History, ed. Christof Mauch (United States [no place]: Berghahn Books, 2004): 74–92; Geoff Watson, ʻSiting the Stage: Representations of Central Asian Environments in British Literature, c. 1830–1914ʼ, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 9 (2007): 96–117.62 For a list of these towns, see Grahame Anderson, ʻWakefield Townsʼ, in Edward Gib-bon Wakefield and the Colonial Dream: A Reconsideration (Wellington: Friends of the Alexander Turnbull Library, 1997), 143–58.63 Winsome Shepherd and Walter Cook, The Botanic Garden Wellington: A New Zea-land History, 1840–1987 (Wellington: Millwood Press, 1988); Eric Dunlop, The Story of Dunedin Botanic Garden: New Zealand s̓ First (Dunedin: Friends of the Dunedin Botanic Garden Inc., 2002).64 F.E. Wright, ̒ On the Desirability of Dedicating to the People of New Zealand Small Areas of Ground, assimilating to the Village Greens of Englandʼ, TPNZI 6, (1873): 416.65 T.H. Potts, ̒ Out in the Open: On Recreation Grounds – The village green or commonʼ, NZCJ 8, 4 (1 July 1884): 277–87; Potts, ʻOut in the Open: A Countryman in Townʼ, NZCJ 12, 1 (2 January 1888): 15–20. Quote from Potts, ʻOn Recreation Groundsʼ, 287. Interestingly, neither of these authors emphasised the particularly masculinist aspects of the importance of games and struggles against nature that characterised much of this period, both in New Zealand and overseas.66 On these ideals, note Erik Olssen, Building the New World: Work, Politics and Society in Caversham, 1880s–1920s (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995).67 Otago Daily Times, 17 December 1866, 5.68 One Interested, ʻMount Edenʼ, NZH, 19 March 1877, 3.69 Armstrong, ʻPlanting in Townsʼ: 50.70 Armstrong, ʻPlanting in Townsʼ:52.71 NZH, 2 November 1880, 6.72 Beattie, ʻWildernessʼ.73 Ruskin and the Environment: The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Michael Wheeler (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 1995); Gay, The Naked Heart, 37–102; Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially 129–49; Schenck, The Mind of the European Romantic.74 William Swainson, Auckland, the Capital of New Zealand, and the Country Adjacent: Including Some Account of the Gold Discovery in New Zealand (London, 1853 [reprint 1970]), 122–3.75 On New Zealand, see John Stenhouse and James Beattie, ʻEmpire, Environment and Religion: God and the natural world in nineteenth-century New Zealandʼ, Environment and History 13 (2007): 413–46, doi:10.3197/096734007X243159; James Beattie, ʻRomanticism, Art and Conservation in Otago, 1840–1860ʼ, Otago Settlers Newsletter 92 (March 2007): 1–4.76 R. McNab, ʻForestry in Its Relation to the Farmʼ, NZF 24 (November 1903): 88.77 Presbyterian Outlook 1 (1894): 289.78 A vast literature on this topic exists. Note, for instance, Lydia Wevers, ʻThe Pleasures of Walkingʼ, New Zealand Journal of History 38 (2004): 39–51; Margaret McClure, ʻBody and Soul: Heroic Visions of Work in the Late Nineteenth Centuryʼ, in Bronwyn

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Dalley and Bronwyn Labrum, eds., Fragments: New Zealand Social and Cultural History (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000), 97–117; Jock Phillips, A Man s̓ Country: The Image of the Pakeha Male: A History (Hong Kong, 1987), 97–101; John M. Mac-Kenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).79 William Wells, ̒ Forestry and its usesʼ, unpublished manuscript presented at the Nelson Philosophical Institute, 5 April 1886, located in MU 156/004/0003. Wellington: Te Papa Tongarewa Archives, New Zealand.80 Grove, Green Imperialism.81 Beattie, ʻEnvironmental Anxietyʼ.82 D. McArthur, ʻOn the Importance of Forestryʼ, TPNZI 15 (1882): 461–3.83 See, for instance, D. Tannock, ʻDunedin City Corporation: Reserves Department An-nual Report, 1910–11ʼ, in City of Dunedin Departmental Reports, 1910–11 (Dunedin: no publisher, 1911), 1–11. In 1924, Tannock observed with satisfaction that during periods of heavy downpour, trees had prevented serious erosion and, moreover, purified water flowing into the catchment. Tannock, Report 1923–24 (Dunedin: no publisher, 1924).84 R.W. Richards, Report, 1907–1908 (Dunedin: no publisher, 1908), 27.85 Kenneth Thompson, ʻTrees as a Theme in Medical Geography and Public Healthʼ, Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 54, 3 (1975): 518–23 (quotation, 521).86 Armstrong, ʻPlanting in Townsʼ, 50.87 Both typhus and typhoid were commonly associated with swamps and cities. Typhus ʻoccurred irregularly in great epidemicsʼ, sweeping aside great swathes of the urban population whereas typhoid often broke out sporadically but with some regularity mostly in late summer and autumn. The variable prevalence and occurrence of typhus, most physicians held, broke out because of ʻthe prevailing epidemic constitution of the atmosphereʼ. Wilson, ʻFeversʼ, 400–6 (quotation, 400). Most physicians also believed, as Hokitikaʼs Surgeon Superintendent did, that it was ̒ a fever generated and propagated by poverty, filth, and over-crowdingʼ. ʻReport of the Hokitika Hospital, by the Surgeon Superintendent for the twelve months ending 30th April, 1869ʼ, County of Westland Gazette 13, (7 June 1869): 77.88 Wilson, 18 June 1860, 20.89 Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (London: Reaktion Books, 2001); Michael R. Dove, ʻ“Jungle” in Nature and Cultureʼ, in Ramachandra Guha, ed., Social Ecology (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 90–115.90 Robert Wyatt Meadows, ̒ A Short History of My Lifeʼ, MS Papers 1700, 11. Wellington: Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand.91 William Coleman, Yellow Fever in the North: The Methods of Epidemiology (Wisconsin Publications in the History of Science and Medicine (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 5, xiv.92 ʻReport of the Hokitika Hospitalʼ: 77. Malaria is actually not found in New Zealand.93 See, Wood, Dirt: Filth and Decay; Maclean, Challenge for Health, 60–90; Dow, Safeguarding the Public Health, 15–41; Edward Dobson, ʻNotes on the Best Method of Meeting the Sanitary Requirements of Colonial Townsʼ, TPNZI 13 (1880): 84–91; J. Turnbull Thomson, ̒ On the Cleansing of Townsʼ, TPNZI 11 (1878): 38–69; W.R.E. Brown, ʻDraining of Towns: Results of having Outfall Drains within Sydney Harbourʼ, TPNZI 9

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(1876): 260–3; J.C. Crawford, ̒ On Thorough Drainageʼ, TPNZI 2, (1869): 211–9; W.D. Campbell, ̒ On the Draining of Townsʼ, TPNZI 9 (1876): 29–37; Edward Withy, ̒ Sanita-tion and Ventilation as required in a Modern Houseʼ, TPNZI 25 (1892): 459–78; John Goodall, ʻOn the Probability of a Water Supply being obtained for the City of Auckland from Mount Edenʼ, TPNZI 6 (1873): 35–40; James Stewart, ʻNotes on the Proposition to Supply Auckland with Water from Mount Edenʼ, TPNZI 6 (1873): 40–2.94 New Zealand Government Gazette (Province of Nelson) 15, 26 (9 July 1867): 103–104.95 ̒ Such draining, covering, filling-up, or cleaning from vegetable growthʼ, it noted, would ʻbe at the expense of, or recoverable from, the landowner or his agent. ̓New Zealand Government Gazette (Province of Nelson) 15, 26 (9 July 1867): 104–7.96 ̒ Province of Nelson: Waterworks Actʼ, Nelson Provincial Council Votes and Proceed-ings, Session 10, No.1 (1863): 7.97 Not all Europeans, of course, feared swamps. ̒ The swamp bounds my run on two sides for miles. They are useful as affording food for infinite numbers of pigs and being the hide out of wild pigs, upon which we partly depend for food at the station. ̓James Edward FitzGerald to Lucius Henry FitzGerald, The Springs Station [Canterbury], 21 March 1853 in ̒ Correspondence of James Edward FitzGerald, Prime Minister of New Zealand, 1854ʼ, Mss Eur D1171/27, London, Oriental and India Office, British Library.98 On this note, for instance, Atholl Anderson, The Welcome of Strangers: An Ethnohistory of Southern Maori, A.D. 1650–1850 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 1998), 131–6, 138–40, 152–5, 176–8; Geoff Park, ̒ “Swamps which doubtless might Easily be drained”: Swamp drainage and its impact on the indigenousʼ, in Environmental Histories of New Zealand, 160–3; Park, Nga Uruora: The Groves of Life: Ecology and History in a New Zealand (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1996), 49, 102–3, 176–7, 206.99 Park, Nga Uruora.100 On this, note especially Waitangi Report, The Ngati Awa Raupatu Report (Wellington: Waitangi Tribunal, 1999), 99–120.101 In settlements like Parihaka (South Taranaki), the spiritual centre of the prophet leader Te Whiti o Rongomai (?–1907) and his followers, aspects of European designs, including close provision of drinking water and drainage, were introduced. On which, see Dick Scott, Ask that Mountain: The Story of Parihaka (Auckland: Reed/Southern Cross, reprint, 1991), 37–8; A.K. Newman, New Zealand Times, 7 October 1881 quoted in Scott, Ask that Mountain, 96.102 For instance, William Farrʼs (1807–1883) national classification of diseases brought together epidemic, contagious and endemic diseases under one banner, ʻzymoticʼ. Ac-knowledging the importance both of environment and humans as possible sources of pollution, it demonstrates that the acceptance of germ theory was not nearly so controver-sial as some have made out. Warboys, ʻGerms, Malaria and the Invention of Mansonial Tropical Medicineʼ. See Andersonʼs fascinating study of these changing ideas: Anderson, Cultivation of Whiteness.103 Note, for instance, the prevalence of miasmic ideas popularly adopted during the 1918 Influenza Epidemic. On which, see Geoffrey Rice, Black November: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in New Zealand (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2005).104 Margaret Pelling, ̒ Contagion/Germ Theory/ Specificityʼ, in Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine: 323–5; Woods, ʻConstructing Colonial Dirtʼ, 14–6.

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105 Danielle Terbenche, ʻ“Curative” and “Custodial”: benefits of patient treatment at the Asylum for the Insane, Kingston, 1878–1906ʼ, Canadian Historical Review 86 (1 March 2005): 33, doi:10.1353/can.2005.0091. See also, David Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (London and Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), 68–72; Cathy Coleborne, Reading Madness: Gender and Difference in the Colonial Asylum in Victoria, Australia, 1848–1888 (Perth: Network Books, 2007), 81–104.106 John Conolly, The Construction and Government of Lunatic Asylums and Hospitals for the Insane, reprinted with an introduction by Richard Hunter (London: John Churchill, 1968 [1847]), 9.107 Charles Mercier, Lunatic Asylums: Their Organisation and Management (London: C. Girffin & Co. 1894), 58–9.108 Occasionally King also allegedly set patients to work on his own properties, much to the chagrin of officials!109 Cherryl Caldwell, ʻTruby King and Seacliff, 1889–1907ʼ, in ʻUnfortunate Folkʼ, 42–3.110 Duncan MacGregor, ̒ Report on Lunatic Asylums of the Colony for 1897ʼ, Appendices to the Journal of the House of Representatives (hereinafter AJHR), vol. 3, H-7, 1898: 7.111 Truby King to David Tannock, 14 April [192]7[?], draft type-written letter, no place [Melrose]. Wellington, Royal New Zealand Plunket Society, Headquarters: Records, ʻGardening, Melrose, etc.), part one, MS-1783/083. HL.112 See, for instance, E. Robertson, ʻThe State Prevention of Consumptionʼ, TPNZI 30, (1897): 66–79; John P. D. Leahy, ʻThe Fight Against Tuberculosis in the Australian Colonies and New Zealandʼ, TPNZI 35, (1902): 220–5. Robertson, for instance, charted the changing emphasis on tuberculosis etiology, from explanations based on impure air, to Kochʼs breakthrough. Robertson, ʻState Preventionʼ: 67. For calls to prevent migrants with tuberculosis coming to New Zealand, see Bryder, ʻ“A Health Resort for Consumptives”ʼ.113 Consumptive migration was a real problem. According to Bryder, ̒ [a] notable feature of the 3,500 or so deaths from tuberculosis in Auckland in the period 1880–1914 was indeed the number of recent immigrants. ̓Bryder, ̒ “A Health Resort for Consumptives”ʼ: 464. Although an Immigration Restriction Act was passed in 1903 to prevent sufferers entering New Zealand, because of the generally sympathetic response of doctors to sufferers of phthisis, it still took a number of years for the regulations to be properly enforced. Bryder, ʻ“A Health Resort for Consumptives”ʼ, 461.114 Kim Middleton, ̒ The Establishment of Tuberculosis Sanatoria in Otago, 1899–1928ʼ, P.G. Dip., University of Otago, 1998, 1–2; Bryder, ʻIf preventable, why not preventedʼ: The New Zealand Response to Tuberculosis, 1901–1940ʼ, in A Healthy Country, 109–27; Maclean, Challenge for Health, 360–82.115 On architecture see, Bryder, Below the Magic Mountain, 49–53; Middleton, ̒ Establish-ment of Tuberculosisʼ, 27–8, 46–7. Pine trees had originally been crucial to wilderness therapy, the forerunner of the sanatorium: on which, see Kenneth Thompson, ̒ Wilderness and Health in the Nineteenth Centuryʼ, Journal of Historical Geography 2 (1976): 145–61, doi:10.1016/0305-7488(76)90253-X; Bryder, Below the Magic Mountain, 47.116 See Middleton, ʻEstablishment of Tuberculosisʼ; Bryder, ʻIf preventable, why not preventedʼ. Climate also remained important in overseas tuberculosis treatment. See Bryder, Below the Magic Mountain, 46–9.

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117 Middleton, ʻEstablishment of Tuberculosisʼ, 30.118 On changing therapies in New Zealand see Middleton, ̒ Establishment of Tuberculosisʼ. On changing therapies in Britain see Bryder, Below the Magic Mountain, 130–98; on BCGʼs introudction into New Zealand see Maclean, Challenge for Health, 375–7.119 J. Macmillan Brown: ʻThe East and the Westʼ, The Press, 24 May 1913, no page.120 R.H. Makgill, ʻNatureʼs Efforts at Sanitationʼ, TPNZI 35 (1902): 139.121 In 1888, for instance, H.P. Higginson still upheld miasma as the cause of Wellingtonʼs high death rate. According to him, Wellington s̓ ̒ sewage-mud festered ̓foreshore ̒ generates foul gases, which force their way upwards through the drains to the higher levels of the cityʼ. Higginson, ʻSanitary Sewerageʼ, TPNZI 22 (1889): 369–78 (quotation, 369–70).122 A useful summary appears in Eric Pawson, ̒ Making Urban Placesʼ, in Environmental Histories of New Zealand, 200–13; on the general background of colonial towns, see David Hamer, New Towns in the New World: Images and Perceptions of the Nineteenth-century Urban Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Note, too, Lynne Lochhead, ̒ Preserving the Brownieʼs Portion: A History of Voluntary Nature Conserva-tion Organisations in New Zealand, 1888–1935 ̓(Ph.D. diss.: Lincoln University, 1994); James Beattie, Jasper M. Heinzen and J.P. Adam, ʻJapanese Gardens in New Zealand 1850–1950: Transculturation and Transmissionʼ, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 28 (2008): 219–36, on the activities of such urban beautifying societies.123 See, for instance, David Tannock to Superintendent of Playgrounds, Philadelphia, 8 June 1914, Botanic Gardens, Dunedin, ̒ Superintendent of Reserves: Correspondenceʼ, Series 3/14, 1914–1925, 1927, 1933–1937, 1914, Dunedin City Council Archives, Dunedin.124 See, for instance, Tennant, Children s̓ Health, 33–7; Kirstie Ross, ʻ“Schooled by Na-ture”: Pakeha Tramping between the warsʼ, New Zealand Journal of History 36 (2001): 51–61; Caroline Daley, ʻSelling Sandow: Modernity and Leisure in Early Twentieth-Century New Zealandʼ, New Zealand Journal of History 34 (2000): 241–61. See also the pamphlet, Sunlight League of New Zealand: Sun and Sea Bathing, Teeth and Nutrition, Mental Health (Christchurch: no publisher, n.d. [1930s?]).125 Kirstie Ross, ʻKnowing nature: New Zealand children and the natural world from the 1890s to World War Oneʼ, Paper presented at Trans-Tasman Forest History: History, Culture and Management, Canterbury University, Christchurch, 29 January–3 February 2007; Colin McGeorge, ̒ The Presentation of the Natural World in New Zealand Primary Schools, 1880–1914ʼ, History of Education Review 23 (1994): 32–45.126 James McNeish, Dance of the Peacocks: New Zealanders in Exile in the Time of Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung (Auckland: Vintage, 2004), 33 (quotation).127 Eric Pawson, ʻConfronting Natureʼ, in John Cookson and Graeme Dunstall, ed., Southern Capital Christchurch: Towards a City Biography, 1850–2000 (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2000), 75–6. See also, Erik Olssen, ʻTruby King and the Plunket Society: An Analysis of a Prescriptive Ideologyʼ, New Zealand Journal of His-tory 15 (1981): 3–23.128 James Beattie, ̒ Environmental Anxiety in New Zealand, 1840–1941: Climate Change, Soil Erosion, Sand Drift, Flooding and Forest Conservationʼ, Environment and History 9 (2003): 379–92, doi:10.3197/096734003129342881.

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